For most people, a decentralized platform will usually be worse (speed, latency), and only very rarely better, than a centralized server. The "paying to access a database" will introduce a lot of issues both for users and developers, no matter how you implement it, for barely any user-facing improvement. And centralized processors appeared to make things easier, so you'd need a payment platform that is as least as easy and, also, that protects you against scams (AFAIK, you can't do too much if someone steals your crypto wallet or you forget the password).
So while I agree that web3 could provide identify + payments, it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.
The vast majority Og people will likely use a custodian for their crypto. For them it will feel like banking feels now.
Just like coinbase provide a visa card with collateral i your crypto.
So essentially these questions really are answered -- it is not an all or nothing. We will keep, eg. Visa to facilitate retailer transactions with collateral in, eg., bitcoin. Bow you can dispute and everything and you pay in crypto.
Also, why would we want bitcoin or any crypto if most people will just use Visa? How does that achieve decentralization? I doubt the goal of cryptocoins is just "replace the financial backend that big companies use".
Centralized web is horrible and dead. Literally _anything_ is a better alternative. The user can be convinced to adopt superior tech even if he does not explicitly know the problems. It just has to feel better.
> it doesn't need to be technically elegant, but user-facing elegant.
dont worry bro. the "set user = happy" voodoo dance has already been done. every cryptocoin wallet is a browser plugin or mobile app with 90% of code for themeing with all the bugs and slowness smartcrap/web users are accustomed to. you are even discouraged from rnunning yoyr own node
Until there is fraud, a dispute, or an innocent mistake.
And this is where the assumption is wrong. Web3 is about gatekeeping for profit, and additionally you not only have to trust a single vendor...but literally every other peer on the decentralized internet to be trustworthy with your data.
Computational security is not the same as data security, and this is where the marketing BS is happening.
As long as there's no permission management and no deletion feature built into the blockchain, your precious private data is as publicly accessible as it never was before.
You think encryption will hold forever? SHA might disagree.
You think 20 years ahead of time the password will still be secure and not leaked anywhere else? Ha, good luck.
The problem that I have with web3 is that 99% are ponzi schemes for gatekeeping ...and the 1% that are left try to market it as a privacy thing, which it cannot be by definition of how a blockchain works.
There are so many broken software programs out there already, and now we made those bugs persistent and unfixable for eternity (with respect to "how secure" user data is stored).
If the web3 would be about real distribution (not the same as decentralization), there could be much much easier solutions for having a local copy of your old myspace photos.
For web2 (which was also abused to death as a buzzword), the defining technical component was asynchronous requests through js and dhtml. Decoupling the rendering of views from data.
For web3 it’s decoupled frontends and backends (the frontends should support being self-hosted/run locally), peer-to-peer and federated architectures, having not SPoF.
Actually I've got a customer using Ethereum first and then Algorand to timestamp events but it was only a little more than calling a HTTP API for us.
Sure, you will still have backend processes but the exposure to "the app" is greatly reduced.
IMO there’s room for small benevolent communities where people choose to share in the cost of infrastructure (e.g. hosting seedboxes in torrenting communities where you are expected to keep your up/down ratio even) but expecting users to run full nodes is a tall order, computation and bandwidth-wise you’re offloading costs to your users. I always thought something like wikipedia could work like this since there’s thousands of committed super-users that could afford to run a background process, and indeed there’s IPFS mirrors of it, but IIRC the edits still happen on jimmy wales’ computer.
As for "who's going to run the nodes", if cryptoeconomics or users don't take care of it, I assume businesses will. The nice thing is that regardless, the payment for this infrastructure is also facilitated through cryptocurrency transactions on L2 networks. For someone who doesn't want or need to take ownership of that, it can just be proxied through to the client and not need to be the concern of the developer of publisher of the app.
Of course businesses can still choose to pony up for it proactively of they have the finances to support it, potentially running it themselves or through a third party. You can always fall back to "the old ways" for certain things when it makes sense.
It's orhogonal to consensus so works equally well on PoW/PoS.
There are a couple of competing and complimentary solutions for L2 on Ethereum. I'm quite sure it will converge at some point.
Most people deploy a backend proxy and use APIs for indexing, etc. Originally, these APIs were centralised (e.g. Infura) but decentralised alternatives now exist (like The Graph).
This is pretty much just the same thing we do today, but wait...
> possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS)
We can use a filesystem that is extremely slow, and also loses all our files if we stop paying AWS to mirror them in S3!
> the backend is a decentralised blockchain
And we can use a really slow database where each write costs $100s in gas fees!
... see, much better!
However, transaction "gas" fees with some chains (Polygon, Solana) are less than 1 cent and you probably know that.
You can pay as much with DynamoDB if you don't optimise anything (and reads are free with the chains, still costly with DynamoDB). Of course, you can say that AWS is overpriced too... maybe that's just inflation going on.
If you go with AWS's most expensive option for access (DynamoDB on-demand, infrequent access), the pricing is $1.56 per million write request units. That's 0.000156 cents per write. That doesn't include data storage, but that ranges between 10 and 25 cents per month, per GB.
There was flattr [1] a while ago, with a similar concept, but it didn't really take off. I'm not sure a more complicated solution with a higher barrier of entry would.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPA
Edit: also, I suspect you’re being cheeky there, because when I Google “SPA”, the top results are local spas (even in private mode), and thus not “places to go for a holiday/vacation”, as if you only guessed what a Google search would give and had decided to make a joke about the ambiguity and most common lay meaning of (case-insensitive) SPA, rather than express an actual frustration at an honest attempt to look up the meaning of that term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Password_Authentication
I guess that’s what led you to “keep googling” the same term over and over?
Either that or they are holding a huge bag of some project-native token and so they have a vested interest in developing it because increased usage usually correlates to the price of said token increasing as well.
SPA = Single Page Application
web3 is a marketing brand that defines a future version of web apps where the frontend is a compiled SPA possibly hosted on decentralised platforms (IPFS) and where the backend is a decentralised blockchain (and in its purest form only that).
This goes a step beyond web 2.0 where you would build a SPA with a cloud backend, e.g. Firebase / Google. With web 2.0, you have to trust the backend (so again in most cases Google or Amazon) and that is a limiting factor for sensitive apps, or simply if you care for decentralisation.
Another addition of web3 is the payments, which could have been standardised in the web platform (I am a former W3C member and there were lots of discussions on that), but instead of the browser implementing payments, we ended up with a few centralised processors like Stripe. Same goes for identity.
Quite interestingly, web3 solves both Identity + Payments with a technically elegant solution. Many people got rich by holding AMZN stock, which is in great part due to AWS -- the cash cow of the company. Why would you have a problem with a cryptocurrency token being used to pay for the backend infrastructure i.e. paying for accessing a database-as-a-service?